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Photorealism is anything but popular in Australia perhaps because it suggests, or rather demands, an attention to detail and technical proficiency of the kind that grunge, which has unanimously been deemed the nineties aesthetic, so heartily denies. Photorealist work by its very nature cannot permit disaffection or dispossession, or can it? Ruth Sallows first solo show, Transcribe, exhibited a startling audacity in so far as these works are paintings which investigate the photographic mark, and reinvest photography with a subjective quality it attempts to deny with its objective gaze. The exhibition at Savode was minimal in context, three paintings in total, and the work produced on a small scale, but each work exacted a maximum attention to detail. Masquerade the Mark, and Grid the Desire, which are companion pieces, both deal with the same naked female subject seen respectively, from above and below. Significantly, they are paintings replicated from the artist's own photographs. Within these two very posed compositional structures is a dialogue about the sexualised female form, but Sallows' paintings on the whole are fairly noncommittal. They suggest a context in which to read the work but refrain from dictating an interpretation, perhaps because the work hovers between photography and painting in a manner which is not quite photorealism, in the seventies sense. It is perhaps better described as an anti-style.
More precisely these are paintings which use technical virtuosity to investigate the photograph 'mark', as the artist refers to it, to push the nuances of photography a little further by investing it with the subjectivity of painting. Sallows' paintings in part, mimic the objective surface of the photograph affecting a kind of disaffection or distance from